Roku Device Features, Settings & Updates

[PlayaCat]

I own a Roku Ultra 4660x. Spec on this site says the Roku Media Player supports Matroska (.mkv) video/audio assets, my most common format. But, when I put a thumb drive into USB slot & select any .mkv file on the drive, the Roku Media Player says it doesn't support this format.

Configuration:

• 10/100 Ethernet
• S/W Version 9.2.0 - build 4807-46
• System Update last checked 3/19/20 11:35 PM EDT
• System last updated 1/14/20 11:45 PM EST
• DeviceID CK3923133785
• USB media Auto Launch - Prompt
• Launch Channel - Roku Media Player
• 1-touch play enabled
• Screen Mirroring Mode - Always allow (but no mirroring devices currently mated).
• Device Connect enabled to pair Roku Voice Remote
• Control Mobile apps Network Access - Default on private network addresses
• Paired with Android Roku App on Samsung Note 10 Plus 5G smartphone, but  I mostly use the  app for a remote & high-end earbuds (the somewhat shoddy 3.5mm connection on the original Roku remote are not very good).
• Auto-adjust display refresh rate - Enabled
• Display Type 4k at 60Hz, HDCP 2.2
• HDR subsampling Disabled (older Visio LED 4320p 60" flatscreen does not support HDR) (Subsampling set for 4:2:2 anyway).

I have the NCH Suite with Prism & Pixillion, but it is expired & I'm not doing any audio/video editing right now, so don't intend to renew for a while. I'm currently converting all Matroska assets using freeware Any Video Converter configured to convert .mkv to Roku 3 Streaming Player MPEG-4 Movie (.mp4) mode. This plays fine, on the Roku, but conversion is slow & can sometimes end up running my quad cores at 100%, so I convert while I'm sleeping.

Is there anything I'm missing in my configuration that I can change to allow Matroska to play natively on my Ultra from a thumb drive? It is in the list of supported formats. I don't see any  reason to set up streaming from my phone or computer if Roku won't even play it from a thumb drive. Should I try a microSD in the Ultra instead?

Help please...

[boogernose]

The Media player is picky.

But it does play .mkv off of mine. I have a 4670 Ultra.

Its quite possible your file is corrupt or not even an .mkv at all.

Easy enough to rewrite the suffix. In my experience switching around these standards can be problematic.

They can be very different in nature with codecs. There are varying compression standards, audio format. It just easily can corrupt files. If you must do this I recommend use a Cloud based solution. There are many if you search for say '.mkv to .mpeg ' or such. Much Faster and reliable.

Assuming you formatted the drive with a good file system like FAT.

Try a different .mkv file as a test. should work.

Another thing is that Thumb Drives are flash memory and they dont last forever.

I'm using a newer USB 3

There are other media Players but they are not free.

Good Luck let us know.......

[renojim]

MKV is a container.  It's the audio and video codecs used within the container that really matter.

[PlayaCat]

I know that - I've been programming advanced digital video since I consulted to Intel in 1990. I know that every company has a separate metadata wrapper & that even something as simple as .mp4 can be packed in many variants. I was leader of the team that wrote BitScream for Front Porch Digital, a realtime transcoder that could receive video in virtually any format & not only change the video format, but change the proprietary meta wrapper (say from Seachange to Pinnacle to Grass Valley to Avid, etc.). I've played Matroska files from a number of different sources with a number of different configurations & meta wrappers  - all of which play on all of the players on my computers but not on my Ultra. My video/audio editing tools are currently expired since I've been working with a major hospital designing AI for organ transplantation & have no time to play with media.

I need advice a bit more sophisticated than newbie surface points that don't speak to my problem. Most likely, my Ultra has a configuration element that should  be changed, or I'm going to have to buy a 4670. For right now, I'm either converting Matroska to Roku 3 .mp4 or watching it on my 1080p computer monitors.

[PlayaCat]

Just changing the .mkv suffix to .mp4 has worked on some, but not all of my .mkv files. The others take hours to transcode with free downloaded editors. I'll try a cloud-based solution, but, given that I use a double-encrypted, double VPN & know enough about clouds NOT to want ANYTHING of mine in a cloud unless I have unique access to the database. I am not a hacker, but I am a programmer with over 45 years of experience including a lot of PENTesting & I have yet to see a cloud from AWS to DigitalOcean with shared resources that I can't penetrate the partitioning on. I have worked under TS/SCI (code word) security in the intel community & know how devastatingly powerful multi-dimensional analysis & predictions are on a sufficient amount of seemingly innocuous data points - so I try to limit public data on myself as much as is possible (nothing's perfect except tossing your computers & phones into the lake).

Definition of the Cloud: "It's 10:00 PM. Do you know in what country your data is?"

[PlayaCat]

BTW, I am using USB  3 with a number of FAT-formatted thumb drives.

[PlayaCat]

Another point...Any Video Converter has yet to fail me. It may be slow & CPU-intensive, but it works like a charm.

[renojim]

There isn't anything special or any setting you have to use to get MKVs to work.  If you really think the codecs used within you MKVs are Roku supported, then you shouldn't need to transcode everything.  Just use something like ffmpeg to repackage.  For ffmpeg it would be something like:

ffmpeg -i video.mkv -acodec copy -vcodec copy video.mp4

Takes a matter of seconds, but you really need to use something like MediaInfo to see what's in your MKVs.  Often it's the audio track(s) that's the problem.  It's a lot faster to just transcode the audio and copy the video track if you can get away with it.

Good luck!

-JT

[atc98092]

MKV is not a format, it is a container. And it's a container that can hold virtually any media content. It is entirely possible for the MKV file to have an unsupported audio and/or video codec. For example, While the majority of Blu Ray discs use the H.264 video codec, which Roku supports, some use the VC-1 codec, which is not supported by Roku. 

Roku devices only support a limited number of audio and video codecs. For audio, it can be Dolby Digital (AC3), PCM, MP4 or AAC (2 channel only). If you are connected to an AVR it will also pass DTS audio through HDMI to the AVR. No lossless codecs are supported (TrueHD, DTS Master Audio). For video, it has to be H.264, MP4 or MOV. 4K players support H.265, and newer players support MPEG-2 (H.262). There's also some audio only codecs that are supported. See this page for more detailed information about playing your own media. 

[atc98092]

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@renojim wrote:

There isn't anything special or any setting you have to use to get MKVs to work.  If you really think the codecs used within you MKVs are Roku supported, then you shouldn't need to transcode everything.  Just use something like ffmpeg to repackage.  For ffmpeg it would be something like:

ffmpeg -i video.mkv -acodec copy -vcodec copy video.mp4

Takes a matter of seconds, but you really need to use something like MediaInfo to see what's in your MKVs.  Often it's the audio track(s) that's the problem.  It's a lot faster to just transcode the audio and copy the video track if you can get away with it.

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That won't work if the video or audio codec are not supported by Roku. And the MP4 container isn't capable of holding some codecs as well.